


turn your doubtful eyes back onto you

by piggy09



Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-09
Updated: 2017-07-09
Packaged: 2018-11-30 00:26:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,707
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11452194
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/piggy09/pseuds/piggy09
Summary: [TAKES PLACE AFTER S5E5. WARNING FOR SPOILERS]Cosima watches Rachel, through the chain link fence between them. Her eyes are inscrutable in the glare that reflects off her glasses.“Oh my god,” she says, disbelieving. “You’rejealous.”Yes.





	turn your doubtful eyes back onto you

Down in the basement, Cosima is huddled in a ball on the concrete ground. She’s shivering – possibly in her sleep, possibly just out of some waking feeling or another. Fear. Heartache. More likely the cold: the skin of Rachel’s chest and arms grows goosebumps as she descends the stairs. The heating isn’t very good down here. Poor Cosima must be frigid.

She bangs her cane against the ground as she comes closer. Cosima jumps. Good.

She wakes up, turns around, sees Rachel and lights up like a wire. “Rachel,” she says, lacing her hands through the chain link fence separating the two of them. “Rachel, Westmorland’s gone crazy, you need to let me out—”

“Let’s not waste time,” Rachel says, interrupting smoothly. “There is nothing you could say to convince me to let you out.” She finds a leather armchair and pivots it with her cane, settles. She rests her hands on the head of the cane. She eyes the blood splatters on Cosima’s shirt and on the skin of her neck. “I received your cure this evening,” she says, and smiles. Just a little bit. “Thank you for it.”

Cosima blinks at her. Oh, Cosima, lightyears behind. To think that everyone loves her. To think that everyone finds her the most brilliant person in the world. To think, again, that they _love_ her – but it’s fine. It’s manageable. Rachel loosens her hands on her cane, feels the places where the ridges of it have dug into her flesh.

“What?” Cosima says, like an idiot. She’s full-on shivering now. Rachel watches, pitiless.

“Which part needs clarification,” she says, like speaking to a child. No, not like speaking to a child: she isn’t pretending to care.

“I don’t know,” Cosima says. “All of it? I didn’t – I didn’t make you a cure, Rachel, I could but I – I need to get _out_ of here—”

“As I said before,” Rachel says. “Your notes were thorough. Mister Westmorland improved on the formula, of course.” She tilts the corner of her mouth up. “No need for a uterine injection.”

She shifts in her chair. “And I,” she says, “am not going to let you out.”

The silence hangs in the air for a moment and Rachel breathes it in. Smells like monster blood, smells like monsters bleeding. “Terrible, isn’t it,” she says quietly, musing to the blood-heavy silence. “To be the golden daughter, and at the end of your day still find yourself in a cage.”

Cosima scoffs a laugh. “I am _not_ the golden daughter,” she says.

_Control yourself_. Rachel feels anger flicker-white hot down the muscles of her arms, shudders it into stillness. “I’m afraid you are,” she says, tight, and bends her lips into a smile. “Or were. We shall see how you fare down here. It _is_ rather cold, isn’t it.”

She leans forward. “They chose you,” she says, hoarse and strained. “One after another. All of them. They had the choice of every possible Leda subject—” ( _me_ , she thinks, with the mewling desperation of a child, _me, me, me me me me me_ ) “—and they chose you. Both Professors Duncan. Aldous. Even Mister Westmorland, it seems. All of them running after _you_. All of them blinded by _you_. What are you, Cosima? You are nothing. A woman with unwashed hair and clumsy drawings on the skin of your wrists – they don’t care about _you_. They care about themselves. You’re merely a mirror for them to see themselves in, when they were younger and more easily impressed by science than the hunger pangs of their ambition. They see the world they used to dream of making, before their dreams changed. _Idealism_ , Cosima. Stupid of any of them to be idealists, and yet they _continue to choose you_.”

At the end of her speech her breathing is rough; her chest heaves. She feels her pendant ticking against her chest, notching her rib bones with seconds. It does not help. Anger claws in her chest, grows teeth to bite with. But: monsters get caged. Rachel is not in a cage ( _yet_ , thinks a quiet furious thing in the back of her mind) and so she is not a monster. She leans back in her chair. Cosima watches her, through the barrier, eyes inscrutable in the glare that reflects off her glasses.

“Oh my god,” Cosima says, disbelieving. “You’re _jealous_.”

Yes.

Words fail her: like she’s sitting in a wheelchair again, blinded by Sarah’s hand on Cosima’s trigger, wilting in a hospital room and hoping that Cosima’s lapdog won’t bite her. Words fail her like she’s in her mother’s basement, listening to Susan talk about Cosima, Cosima’s cure, Cosima’s brilliance, Susan locking Rachel underground and leaving for the mainland to meet _Cosima_ , Susan giving Rachel up to receive _Cosima_ , Susan snarling in the kitchen that it was always supposed to be _Cosima_ —

“I’ve watched you for your entire life,” Rachel says, staring at a patch of concrete that is no different than any other patch of this damnable concrete. “Your data skews towards the mean. Believe me when I tell you that there is _nothing_ special about you, Cosima. Absolutely nothing. I have plotted the course of your life, the way Westmorland has plotted mine. Your university applications. Your apartments. Your family. Your loves.

“They don’t understand you,” she says, “the way that I do. They only see the potential in you. What you could be, hundreds of years from now. But _I_ know how many tests you’ve failed, Cosima. I’ve seen you bumping along through mediocrity for twenty years.” She sighs out through her nose. “They’ll come to realize it too,” she says. “Afterwards.”

“After you let me die in this basement,” Cosima says, words still ringing hysterical with disbelief.

“After,” Rachel says again.

Cosima’s hands clench on the wires. “Sorry to steal your dads, or whatever,” she says, “but did you ever think that maybe they all like me better, not because of idealism or _whatever_ it is you’re telling yourself, but just because I’m like – a person? Jesus, Rachel, did you ever think there’s maybe something wrong with _you?_ ”

She stands up. “What,” she says, “Sarah’s on the mainland and that’s, like, too far for you so you’re just gonna hate me instead? Is that all you do, Rachel? Find reasons why everyone loves all your other clones more than you so you don’t have to think about the fact that maybe you’re just _unlovable?_ ” She paces around her cage, frantic and jumping. “Congratulations. You won. I’m gonna die—” (her voice crumples around the word _die_ ) “—in this frickin’ cage and you’re gonna go back up there and it won’t even matter, because you’re still going to be exactly the same. And they’re not gonna love you. And so maybe you can get on your helicopter and go back to Toronto and hate Sarah again, until Sarah’s out of reach, and then you can – get pissed at _Helena_ or something, and it’s never going to make any of this better. It’s never going to fix you, Rachel, you piece of _shit_.”

Rachel’s mind is a dull echo: how does this keep happening. Alison _Hendrix_ reduced Rachel to a small hollow voice on the phone – and here is Cosima, caged, flushed and triumphant and undoubtedly having just won something. Cosima leans against the wall between them, hands twisting all over that chain link fence. She sees something in Rachel’s face that Rachel didn’t intend, because of course she does. Of course she sees it there. Cosima looks to the side, behind her; slumped in the dark is a body. Monsterblood. She looks away from it and back to Rachel.

“We could be working together,” Cosima says. Her hands twist. “Westmorland’s a _liar_ , Rachel, he’s just gonna dump you when he gets bored. You know that, right?”

Smart: she doesn’t wait for Rachel to answer. Rachel’s answer would be _no_ , because – god help her, she has to believe in something. But Cosima is still talking: “You _said_ , to my _face_ , that you’re as invested in this as I am. Make a change, Rachel. Do something. For your sisters. Hell, for yourself, I don’t care why. But don’t just be what he wants you to be. You’re so much smarter than that.”

Rachel watches Cosima watch her. Suddenly she is inside of it, that feeling, the one belonging to every mother and every father she’s ever almost had: the desperate need for Cosima’s regard. Cosima’s attention and hope is focused on her like a bright light and it feels good, despite everything inside of Rachel saying that it shouldn’t. Cosima, chosen by everyone, has chosen _her_. Cosima believes in _her_.

“I’m already cured,” Rachel says softly.

“Rachel, that wasn’t—”

“Neolution saved me,” Rachel says, “and I am born again.” The words echo bitter and wry with a joke she doesn’t intend for Cosima to understand. The two of them watch each other through the bars. Behind Cosima, Westmorland’s previous monster slumps motionless against the wall.

“He chose me,” Rachel says, and her voice is a small desperate sound. She swallows, builds it back up louder. “And then he put me to the side, for you. But. Now he’s grown bored of you.” Her eyes are lowered and she watches her own hands on her cane. She used to paint her fingernails, but Westmorland prefers that she doesn’t. So she doesn’t anymore. “They all grow bored of you, eventually. The plants in the greenhouse wilt. They let their mistakes out into the woods and when those monsters come crawling home they meet no sympathy but a bullet to the skull. They kill all the unbearable reminders of their own naivety.” She looks up at Cosima. She smiles. “But I am still here.”

“That pencil should have killed you,” Cosima says in a voice scraped raw. It doesn’t sound melancholy and it doesn’t sound like a threat. Just a statement of fact.

“I know,” Rachel says, and pushes herself up to standing. “Have hope, Cosima,” she says as she climbs the stairs. “Someone will come and let you out.”

She stops at the door, at the top of the stairs. “They always do,” she says, and lets herself back into the house.

**Author's Note:**

> Twist your tiny lies into the truth  
> Spinning a web with your fantasies  
> Turn your doubtful eyes back onto you  
> You're pushing me out with your jealousy
> 
> I've had enough of what you've been telling me  
> You're pushing me out  
> You're pushing me out  
> You're pushing me out with your jealousy  
> \--"Jealousy," Robert Delong
> 
> Thanks for reading! Please kudos + comment if you enjoyed! :)


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